My FICO score took a hit a few months ago, down to 766 from 779 at the beginning of the year. I use my Discover Card to make zero-interest balance transfers in order to halve the interest rate on chunks of my student loan balances and I wanted another card to help with that, so I chose to get Discover It. My first FICO decline was 9 points from opening the card (lowering my average credit account age) and I believe the second decline (4 points) was from the balance transfer to that new card (adding to the number of accounts with balances that I have).
I'm moving in July and will have my credit score checked by utilities companies to determine whether or not I pay a deposit or how much the deposit will be. I don't even know if 13 points would make a difference, but I only have $1,000.00 saved for moving expenses (I'm moving to another apartment in town that's not very far away but will cut my commuting distance by 2/3) so I want my score to be as high as possible to limit paying too much in deposits. I'm not sure what credit score will be checked but I figure increasing my available credit will positively affect all my scores due to decreasing my utilization rate, as long as it gets reported to the bureaus in time. Though my current utilization is around 3-4% so I may have reached the point of diminishing returns with that route, but it can't hurt to try.
I don't know if this has been brought up in another topic but I wanted to share what I learned in case it can help someone else with their credit utilization rate.
Citi Credit CardsYour Personal Finance Pro has an article about increasing your Citi credit card limit (
http://yourpfpro.com/increase-citi-credit-card-limits/).
READ THE FINE PRINT. The article gives examples of Citi cards that did not require a hard credit card pull but one Citi card did, and the author didn't realize he had missed the fine print until it was too late. When I went to the website (
https://www.accountonline.citibank.com/cards/svc/LoginGet.do?NEXT_SCREEN=/ICLI&siteId=CB), it stated they would not pull my credit file and I ended up getting a $2,000.00 increase to my credit limit.
Discover Credit CardsAfter you log in to your Discover account online, go to the 'Account' tab at the top and select 'Credit Line Increase.' The next screen will ask for your gross annual income, employer name, and monthly housing payment. There is a statement that
they may need to do a hard pull on your credit report, but they will give you a warning if that's the case and then won't process the application without your consent. Both my Discover Card and Discover It Card were increased without a hard pull: +$1,000.00 for Discover and +$2,500.00 for Discover It. Also, there is a sliding scale on the approval screen in case you want to lower the amount of the increase.
Naturally, my credit card spending remains the same whenever my limits increase and I only transfer about $600.00 at a time from my student loans; otherwise, increasing the limits would do nothing to help my utilization rate. I pay all my credit card balances in full each month (except the balance transfers).
Anyone know about other credit cards/credit card companies that offer credit limit increases with only soft pulls?